The balance between form and function

[M II A II R II K]

The balance between form and function


July 7 2010



Read More: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c60f9a52-8...tml?ftcamp=rss

The trade-offs between having a prestigious building that makes a mark on the skyline but which is also a good place to work in are notorious. A spectacular landmark, such as London’s 30 St Mary Axe, the Lord Foster-designed building known as the “Gherkin”, can literally put a business on the map and broadcast its owner’s ambitions to the world. But monuments to corporate pride also create a host of challenges for their occupants.

“Curved funky structures use space inefficiently and can be expensive to fit out,” says Hugh Mulcahey, a director at Cyril Sweett, the property consultants. Tall, thin towers often wreak havoc with team working by splitting departments across several floors. And, while a soaring column may look good from the outside, hermetically sealed interiors can leave occupants feeling jaded.

Linda Felmingham, director of administration at Hunton & Williams, a US law firm that rents space in the “Gherkin”, says working in “a lovely building that everyone knows about” definitely has the wow factor. “If I get in a cab I don’t give the address, I just say ‘The Gherkin’,” she says. On the downside, she highlights security, which has to be watertight to guard against the possibility of terrorist attack. “All our visitors have to go through airport-style scanners.”

Bold attempts have been made to resolve the tension between form and function in workplace architecture, and not all have been successful. In the early 1990s, the architect Ralph Erskine designed the Ark, a vast ship-like building next to the Hammersmith flyover in west London, as the perfect space for open-plan working. But for years it stood empty.

The basic problem, says Stuart McLarty a partner at De Novo-Architecture, which radically restructured the inside of the building in 2006, was that the hollow interior mirrored the highly bespoke specification of its intended owner-occupier and could not be partitioned. When that company quit the UK before moving in, the property struggled to attract tenants. Another drawback was the soaring interior walkways, which terrified vertigo sufferers. “We went to one event [before the redevelopment solved the problem] where a caterer was too scared to cross an internal bridge to get to the reception,” recalls Mr McLarty.

Germany’s tallest building, Commerzbank Tower, home to Commerzbank’s Frankfurt headquarters and also designed by Lord Foster, has done a better job of marrying statement architecture and employee comfort. After conducting research among staff, the bank built the tower around garden atria that let in natural light. Creating a double-layer facade solved the problem of how to draw away wind from the upper stories, allowing occupants at the top of the building to open and close windows instead of relying on air-conditioning. “We looked at how we could make working more attractive,” says Arno Walter, the bank’s head of organisation.

[Bedhead]

Ha, I was just reading this today.

It seems that a lot of criticisms levelled at iconic buildings are equally valid for conventional buildings. For example, they argue that towers' small floorplans mean that people get split over several floors, creating silos. But boring buildings can have small floorplans too - any building built on the site of the Gherkin would have had the same size floorplan, whether it was short or tall - the pre-existing site dictated the size of the floorplan.

Equally, some of London's biggest floorplans can be found in the towers of Canary Wharf.

The idea that curved buildings waste space seems pretty lame, too. Rectangular buildings often have vast corner offices, and the rectangular office that I work in has a walkway round the edge of the central core, creating blind corners where people routinely come within inches of crashing into each other.

People I've spoken to who work in the Gherkin do complain about the security, though, but hell, I'd wait in a queue to go to a meeting there. And there are plenty of coffee shops within a minute's walk if you want to meet someone without the hassle of security.